this hack has issues. this hack has many issues. as of right now i am unsure if i will finish playing this hack, but i will share some things i have noticed. (edit; yeah im never finishing this lmao)
your first slew of levels just utilize basic koopas and goombas. i know you want to walk the player into your hack (for some reason), but i mean even smw started off with interesting sprites like the rex and the banzai bill, the second level had charging chucks, the third level was an athletic level and then the fourth had spike balls. this has... goombas and koopas, followed by some more goombas and koopas, maybe a piranha plant or two, and nothing of any real substance.
secondly, this hack suffers from slowdown in a shit ton of areas. this is primarily because of your sprite status bar. theres a reason other sprite status bars (like the dkc status bar and lx5's status bar) disappear when theyre no longer needed. pretty much every encounter with more than like 4 enemies on screen causes noticeable slowdown. this is also hilariously evident in the first castle, where you have goomba spawners that launch out a million of those fuckers to instantly slow the game down to a crawl. the water castle also has this issue pretty strongly. i would suggest either using a layer 3 status bar or using a sprite status bar that disappears when it is not needed, cos your alternative of cutting down sprite usage even more is just going to make this hack even more boring.
thirdly, i find it odd how you have chosen to replace the majority of the graphics, but not all of them. every unchanged smw graphic clashes slightly with your gfx. i also really am not a fan of your recurring graphical trope of creating dirt that looks like this:
this looks like you just took the same two 8x8s and just flipped them. it looks really fucking bad, and i would strongly suggest making more fluid looking patterns a la smw or making more evidently noticeably patterns (like you have in your third level).
the last thing is the fact that this hack is rather boring. a hack being easy does not mean it should have little effort into enemy placement or level design: i played through 2 worlds and every level felt like the same left to right run and jump and avoid goombas and koopas. there is so little individual identity to these levels past their graphical treatment and very little to rope the player in to having a genuinely good time. i would not be surprised if what took the longest with this hack was drawing the graphics for these tilesets - the level design seems to be done rather quickly and haphazardly with seemingly no genuine consideration of whether it will be an interesting and memorable experience. you also take ideas and reuse them multiple levels in a row: the first three levels are all the same goomba and koopas with piranha plants, levels 3 and 4 of world 2 both use the same crabs (which i thought i wouldnt be able to jump on cos theyre crabs, but apparently you can), and the first 3 levels of world 9 all utilize the same fucking fire pillars. judging by these three instances i cannot help but assume this may be a recurring issue with this hack.
anyway, i might as well show off some things i noticed playing through the first two worlds (and a bit of world 9). i noticed some other things pointed out in this thread already, but i have no reason to repeat them.
this looks noticeably miscolored.
i dont know if
this patch will fix a custom sprite goomba, but it will fix the koopas doing this (which is very easy to make happen since you give the player a million fire flowers)
good boss 👏👏👏
good boss 2.0 👏👏👏 (also the double doors not acting like double doors is silly)
obviously you can see the issue here.
🤔
obviously you are aware that the player can swim under levels in underwater stuff, but i noticed in this spot i'd randomly activate a note block and die instantly. i would suggest looking into a floor generator through levelasm or some shit so the player cant swim under, or using a patch that raises the death area up.
the fact that these end blocks also act as conveyors is ass. honestly i want to take a moment to talk about how not fun this level is. it is way harder than any level before it and way harder than the level after it: there is just too much shit going on. you have a million thwomps going every which way, you have conveyors everywhere so the player can barely catch a break, random mecha koopas who serve no purpose and are easy to deal with, the third instance of fire pillars in a row, and layer 2 smashers that i can die if i run into from the side if the conveyor pushes me into it. there is just way too much going on here and so little focus.
it is evident that this hack is not really for me. i don't really like the notion that this is more in the vein of mario world or something (in the sense that it is supposed to be a fun rompy simple experience), because i think even mario world crafted a unique identity for itself and the levels would often rope the player in and create a fun experience. i think this weighs too heavily on reusing the same ideas and has too little focus on level design that it becomes a heavily uninteresting project.
edit; you can probably disable nuts being killable by shell with the .cfg editor, though i'll also take this second to talk about how i think it looks pretty bad that the nut doesnt have gfx when its moving. it looks rather stationary when you jump from it rather than in its original games where it would move.